Posted
by
timothyon Friday August 24, 2012 @07:18PM
from the still-unfolding-though dept.

pdabbadabba writes "The jury is in in the epic patent dispute between Apple and Samsung and Apple appears to be coming out on top. The court is still going through the 700+ items on the verdict form, but things seem to be going Apple's way so far. In the case of Apple's various UI patents, the jury is consistently ruling that Samsung not only violated Apple's patent, but did so willfully." Reader bob zee also points to the AP's story, as carried by Breitbart.com, and Charliemopps adds Reuters' take. Reader Samalie contributes a link to a live blog of the (at this writing) ongoing recitation of the verdict. Whether you like it or not, even this verdict won't be the last word.

I work for the law firm representing Apple in multiple jurisdictions (and have met Mike Jacobs personally - really nice guy). I am personally not a fan of Apple products, but understand their allure, and support these devices in our environment as needed.
I have sided with many (most?) folks who think the patent system is ridiculous, and side with others that Apple is the new Evil.
Granted, the lawyers are making a killing on this - for both sides. These guys and gals are not the ambulance chasers you see in CSI, Boston Legal or whatever. They're corporate lawyers, and for the most part work with corporations who are willing to pay their legal fees (whether with respect to litigation, or more commonly joint ventures, capital markets and other non-criminal type of law). Not to mention the Pro Bono stuff that does a lot of good towards society in general.
Not trying to sway the anti-lawyer sentiment, but just wanted to lay out the other side of the "lawyers are money grabbers" side of things. There is a place for law, lawyers, and, where I work, it's a decent bunch of folks with good working conditions.

There's not going to be a billion dollars changing hands. This will go on to appeal. Apple can't even afford to punish samsung given they make all the key parts. What apple won was it's certain there will be an injunction against samsung from making things that copy iphoe concepts. Everyone else will get the wake up call. It's good. they will have to think of other designs, come up with their own stuff. They have had plenty of time now.

Who actually got hurt in this battle? Well apple probably lost some market share. But it's nokia that got killed. Nokia lost out to all the cheap non-apple spamrtphone makers who got ahead on these google powered apple work-alikes. Nokia didn't play that game and look where it got them. Nokia got hurt far worse than a a billion.

Eric Schmitt is the one that should be paying in the end. The reason the damages were so high is because the jury did't just decide that the two devices looked a bit alike but rather that the similarity was willful. The samsung documents showing that even they thought their innovations just didn't measure up to apples refinements was the nail in the coffin. That is, if all these things were really obvious and easily arrived at by clever engineers then that document woul dnot have existed and googles android not been so slavish a copy of the human interface features.

Surely there is more than one way to make a smart phone? Yes. Microsoft is clearly answering that question with a much more differentiated product that actually licenses the parts of its OS that are like apple from apple and others.

Nokia got killed because they didn't give consumers what consumers wanted, that was entirely Nokia's decision and Google didn't play any part in it.

The reason the damages were so high is because the jury did't just decide that the two devices looked a bit alike but rather that the similarity was willful.

Look, regarding Apple "innavation", most of the "look and feel" and even the features were copied from StarTrek by Apple.

The PADD devices seen on The Next Generation, DS9, and Voyager all did things that are major selling points for the iPad and iPhones.

* Touchscreen device
* Played video and sound
* dynamic user interface could be customized to serve the application
* Video conferencing
* Loaded and saved information to the remote storage (In this case the a ship or Starfleet computers would be "the cloud")
* Data could be synced between devices
* Device could be re-configured to remotely control a workstation (remote desktop)
* They even have rounded corners
* Devices could be encrypted

All of those functions are demonstrated or spoken of in episodes or described in Mike Okuda's ST:TNG Technical Manual (Okuda was the lead designer on most of the newer television Star Treks)

I believe typically the fees include your very soul, the souls of your children and significant others, your very hopes, dreams and aspirations, with an airtight guarantee of a certain % of all future occurrences of personal satisfaction. I believe that is fairly typical; some lawyers charge more. It varies.

Steve Jobs [wikipedia.org] had four [wikipedia.org] children. His first [wikipedia.org], Lisa, he had with his girlfriend, and he denied being her father for a long time. He named the Lisa computer after her. They didn't have a good relationship early on, but eventually made up and she lived with him for several years. He had three other children (Reed, Erin, and Eve) with his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs [wikipedia.org].

In the case of both Apple and Samsung, you have a legal department that you're already paying anyway, so the costs of litigation amount to practically nothing.

It doesn't make sense to retain on payroll a legal team able to litigate in all territories in which a company operates. Some US states require membership of their respective bar associations, so think of the cost of covering that. Scale this up to an international scale and what you have is a legal department so big they may as well begin farming it out Amazon AWS style.

What's more likely is that they retain legal teams to handle compliance and assess legal issues. Where serious litigation comes in to the picture, they'll engage a law firm. See this story for an example of Samsung using a law firm. Amusingly enough, one of their lawyers overlooked the need to be registered with the local bar association:

If a precedent is set here, someone will use it against Apple in the near future... plus this has cost them what remained of their positive image amongst the rest of the tech community.

It's quite obvious that Samsung's claims about prior art have merit. Apple's collective belief that they are wholly responsible for the conceptual development of every product they release is both arrogant and farcical, but i guess that's what you get taking your corporate direction from a CEO who'd rather yell at his family for a year than seek treatment for the illness that was killing him.

Where I work, there is a growing number of prior-Apple users. Recently, an update rendered his (and thousands of others) WiFi useless. The Apple geniuses tell him it's a hardware problem and can't replace his phone because they are out of that model. (With so many suffering this condition, it's no wonder.) No more Apple stuff for this guy. He is completely convinced they are idiots. Others have other stories to tell, but it all comes down to disappointment and their wanting to do things which they cannot do because Apple is in their way.

I can't imagine my office is some sort of anomaly. There's like 300 people and of them, perhaps about 40-50 remaining Apple users which is a sharp change from a seemingly 50% about 2 years ago. And yes, they went to Android devices... some Motorola, some Samsung, some HTC...

Apple is doing just fine at screwing its own image lately... or, in truth, you might say Android is screwing Apple's image up since it is showing people what they can't do with iPhone which is, for the most part, the biggest reason Apple users are growing dissatisfied.

The press surrounding this law suit? Well, it will convince the fans that they joined the winning team and will hold their iPhones tighter. That's fine. It won't kill Android... Android will outlast Apple's iPhone... Android will probably outlast Apple as a company. They don't have the iconic demi-god in charge any longer and no one knows how to think different any more. Business is always risk averse and Jobs was always just the opposite... unafraid to go out there with something and sell it as something awesome. Meanwhihle, the rest of Apple thinks something actually has to be awesome before they can sell it.

Welcome back to the dying Apple. Law suits will be their only source of income soon.

Thats funny. My office of 5000+ is about to buy iPhones for 20% of them to replace aging Blackberry phones. With that they have already purchased mass provisioning and corporate app distribution capabilities.

Thats funny. My office of 5000+ is about to buy iPhones for 20% of them to replace aging Blackberry phones. With that they have already purchased mass provisioning and corporate app distribution capabilities.

Guess personal anecdotes only tell a narrow picture of the landscape.

We really only have your personal anecdote to back up the assertion that personal anecdotes only tell a narrow picture.

There's no need to use your imagination to extrapolate from the guy in your office. iPhone sales are a matter of record, and they continue to grow and grow. "Dying Apple" is is your wet dream, it's far from reality. Indeed Apple just became the most valuable company in the world, ever.

This happened with Microsoft, too - about a decade ago. (The fact that I can remember it well, as if it were yesterday, probably means I'm not young anymore.)

Then they started their long spiral decline. They took a shot in the arm up with W7 and 2k8, and Office365 has been a big success, but for the most part their asses have floated on the Xbox360 and residual corporate sales/licensing for some time.

Apple does not have such a luxury. Phones have a much shorter 'shelf life' than a game system, and drastically lower loyalty (largely due to the demographic, I'd imagine). They don't have a corporate hegemony, as the vast majority of their sales are consumers. They don't have reoccurring annual licensing at all, for that matter, and their further releases/updates are highly dependent on people buying new Apple hardware.

We are approaching 'smart phone saturation' at this point. Everyone who wants an Android or Apple cell phone has one, because they're simply that common.

And we are seeing a bit of bedlam amongst Apple users. We sysadmins are all seeing and knowing, after all.:) I have seen a number of power users (can we still use that term, or does that just make me old?) replace their aging Macs with new HPs, Lenovos, etc. due to the constant hardware and software issues they were experiencing (on 10.4 and 10.5 systems, no less). I have seen quite a few people jump from iPhones to even the first generation Verizon Android devices due to problems with their iPhones - and like it. Hell, even the iPhone users I know still apologize for things like their poor cellular signal, and those I do know are increasingly in a shrinking minority, sticking with what they know; most are academics who use Macs out of habit or the UNIX heritage, or simply because they're being pretentious twats and want to look better than everyone else.

Indeed Apple just became the most valuable company in the world, ever.

Let me just say this...With Apple now being where Microsoft was in value (and plus some now), and with Apple now suing everyone that they can get their hands on. Apple has become the new Microsoft of our age. You can almost smell the monopoly and abuse of their monopoly on the horizon. It's heart breaking and awesome to see history repeat itself.

Additionally, Apple has lost every shred of credibility in pretty much all of my circle of friends. Which I know, doesn't mean squat, but I believe that this may very well mark the start of the end for Apple. Once you become viewed as the tech bully of the world, you start to loose you're ability to attract good talent. You start to be viewed as, the creative versus The Man. I don't know any company that "won" people over by being on a platform of being "The Man".

Of course, that's just one reason why mono-culture has never won. However, please continue gushing about the iPhone and Apple like the MS fanbois of days long since past.

Not really, both companies will spend the next number of years appealing these cases in all jurisdictions. Eventually Apple, Samsung, and Google will settle things up and form a nice little patent license cartel. (Which is the ultimate goal, these lawsuits are just part of the negotiation.)

You do realize Apple did not sue Samsung before 2010 when Samsung's phones did not look like the iPhone, right?

Was that before or after Steve Jobs vowed to go "thermonuclear" on android devices?

Apple has also sued Motorolla, HTC, and of course Samsung. Apple has sued over phones and tablets over everything from rounded corners, hyperlinked phone numbers, click to zoom on text, searching more than one source when a voice search is used, pinch to zoom, icon placement and many, many more frivolous reasons. Apple is not just trying to get Samsung phones banned in the US, including the new SIII, but they are also going after tablets and other manufacturers, trying to get them BANNED as well.

So, if Apple were to have won all her lawsuits, we'd have no HTC phones, no Samsung phones or tablets and no Motorolla phones being sold in the US. This is not a talking point, this is FACT! Apple is trying to BAN THE COMPETITION!

This [cnn.com] ban was placed before Samsung was even guilty of anything. The latest HTC Evo line was delayed for the same reason as Apple is trying to get the banned.

If you really believe that Apple has discovered the One True Way for smartphones to work. On the other hand, the decision increases the incentives in favor of companies with the creativity to develop approaches that differ from Apple's, and will likely increase the diversity of designs available to consumers.

Your logic is pretty absurd. If I had patents for using mouse and keyboard combination for desktop computers and then sued the hell out of everyone who dared using it, would you also just shrug and tell them to be innovative? If Microsoft sued everyone for using right-click context menus and double-click, would you agree with them and again propose linux, Apple etc to be innovative and come up with something else?

Some ideas cannot be easily circumvented because their alternatives are just too impractical. (Like typing a word document without a keyboard.)

The analogy I use is this - imagine Frank Whittle patenting the turbojet - "A method for generating thrust from a tube(1). Air is taken in at the front(2), fuel is injected in the middle(3), and high speed hot air is ejected out the back(4)". That's all folks, not other details, just the inputs and outputs, and voila, a software patent is born.

Funnily enough, the only arguments that people have is whether you get the name wrong, not whether the concept is ridiculous.

There are 313 million people in the USA, and whilst they probably have one of the highest percentage of people with a good disposable income compared to the rest of the world, at some stage the rest of the world is going to say "it's not worth dealing with you guys". It's sad really, because you guys came up with some fucking incredible stuff in the past.

I agree that the situation is fucked up, but can we do without the brainless cliches for once? Yeah, it's a big payday for the lawyers, but that's true every day in this litigious society. They're not the winners, they're just well-paid peons.

The winner (of a sort, see below) is Apple. They're the ones that hired the lawyers, and the lobbyists, and the politicians, so that they can cash in big on a few design patents.

The losers is everybody who depends on innovation. Which is to say everybody, including Apple, though they they will see some short term financial benefits.

What's the answer? Well it's not to elect Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul, or Ralph Nader, or Ross Perot, or whoever the white knight is this week. Even if such a pure-minded soul had the slightest hope of winning an election in the real world, he'd be even less well equipped to fight The Bad Guys than mainstream politicians.

You've got to fix the system. You've got to throw away the stupid cliches, develop an actual understanding of how the system works, and start electing people who will actually fix it. Not just Presidents. Representatives and Senators too. (How many of you know the name of your Representative and where he or she stands on IP issues?) And you keep an eye on what they're doing, not just wait until it becomes obvious that they've sold out and whine about it.

That's hard work, and it won't happen overnight. It's so much easier to say "Don't Reward Corruption!" and refuse to have anything to do with mainstream politics. But it's time to give up on the lazy, simple-minded righteousness and actually do stuff.

Nice theory, you are gonna do this....how exactly? In my state we had a DINO for over a decade and when the DINO got so damned arrogant they didn't even bother to pretend anymore we replaced them with...the RINO that had been running for the past decade that is just as big a corporate shill.

The thing you seem to forget is by the time they even make it to state rep they've been whoring so damned long for cash they might as well have permanent kneepads grafted. The only way you could possibly change it is to gut and rebuild the entire election process, and considering we are talking about a multi-billion dollar business, one of the big winners of which is the MSM who will happily crucify anybody who attempts to cut off their money train? yeah...good luck with that.

Because in the 90s the only operating system people ran was windows. Riiiiiight. Maybe for PC users it was the dark ages......

Let's see, there was the Mac which was declining taking Apple to the brink of bankruptcy. Amiga went under. Atari floundered and disappeared. I'm pretty sure Acorn and its RiscOS went under. Next had a miniscule portion of the market. BeOS struggled, then died. OS/2 desperately tried to lure folks with nun commercials and failed. I don't think GEOS even made it into the 90's ? All the while MS was shuffling out crap like Windows 3.11 and later the slightly more bearable Windows 95. Nope, looks like everything was just fine.

The Internet was a great step forward. But as far as computers themselves were concerned it was. We when from a wide variety of computer platforms in the 80s to more or less a Wintel monoculture in the 90s, where the only points of distinction between different computers was numbers of MHz, and MBs. The 90s in computing was horrible. If you don't recognise that, you're probably to young to remember what it was like before.

So, you think Apple should have had sole ownership of GUIs and smartphones? Windows and Android should just go away? Now that is facile.

Actually, that is EXACTLY what Apple and its fanbois want. Now, I understand why Apple wants to eliminate the competition, but I've never been able to figure out why Apple's fanbois want to see all other smartphones to go away. Again, it would be good for Apple, but the fanbois would actually be hurt if they are locked into purchasing from an Apple monopoly. It's as if they get mad or feel threatened when someone other than Apple gets something they used to have exclusively or never had at all. For example, when Instagram was released for Android, Apple fans got mad [cnn.com]. Why? Why would they care if Android users got Instagram?

If standardizing user interfaces is illegal, isn't that the same as making the company with the most popular interface a monopoly? I wouldn't mind so much if it weren't that Apple also demands that right to determine what content and software you can put on your device. And they want a cut of every sale of software or content.

This is reminiscent of George Selden [wikipedia.org] and his patent on the automobile. If he'd been allowed to enforce his patents against Henry Ford, there'd be no cheap cars that ordinary people could afford. But that would have been OK, Ford was just a "copyist" right?

"Question 5 [forbes.com]: For each of the following products, has Apple proven by a preponderance of the evidence that Samsung Electronics Co. (SEC) and/or Samsung Telecommunications America (STA) has infringed the D’677 Patent?The answer is yes for all but one of the devices. The no is Galaxy Ace."

And see voiceofworldcontrol's answer below.

How was it that they were found not to be infringing? Under what argument? Just because they were not Android or something?

Because it's not about friggin' rectangles but about copying a very specific design presumably.

If you look at the list of infringing devices, the ones that were found to infringe had more than simply "rounded corners" in common with iPhone. I think the jury did an excellent job of sussing out which devices were copying iPhone and which ones weren't.

I call bullshit, that jury was stacked. You can't sift through such a complex case in 22 hours and come to an informed decision.

If you've ever been on a jury, you know that it's going to be full of people with very little idea of what's going on and who don't want to be there. Most of them had probably made their decisions well before deliberations even started.

It has nothing to do with the jury being "stacked" in any way; it's just a function of how juries are chosen and how they operate.

109 pages of jury instructions, 700 question's to answer no way that can be done in 22 hours less they went in to deliberation with mind set up they were gonna side with apple on about everything. a decent jury would reviewed all the devices in question for each patent and that would take a while.

"Stacked" is a dangerous word, implying Apple illegally influenced the jury before they made that verdict. Unless you have evidence of this, don't throw around a word like that lightly. If you merely think that Apple is simply lucky with the jury panel they got in this case, then just say so.

It doesn't imply illegality. It just implies that the jury was already predisposed to favor Apple. And that seems to be the case.

According to the jury, Apple did not infringe Samsung's patents. But this doesn't stand to reason. Even Apple says they infringed Samsung's patents. Their argument was that they should be licensed in FRAND terms. It also makes no sense that the jury rejected prior art for the pinch and zoom.

The only way these things could have happened is if the jury was playing favorites.

The fact that it was a US company against a south korean one, in a court in close proximity to Apple HQ risks stacking the jury to the favour of the home team.

And 'stacking' the jury is part of jury selection, both sides are trying to find people likely to be sympathetic to their cause and unsympathetic to the other side.

There will probably be more complaints about judicial bias going forward and hopefully somewhere along the lines someone blames the Samsung legal team for doing a shitty job, and the patent system for being designed badly enough that this could happen and so on.

Part of what might come out of this could be interviews with jurors, and we'll get to find out if they were actually clueless, upholding rules they thought were stupid, but ultimately the rules they had to work with, or whether they clearly felt Apple innovated and Samsung copied.

Yeah. And the funny thing is, back when they were ripping off RIM instead of Apple they actually had the chutzpah to call their Blackberry knock-off a "Blackjack". This whole affair is pretty much SOP for Samsung.

Ya know, as much as I get patent infringement as a patent holder, alot of this is really really trivial. The iPhone isn't really so much different than the Treo I used years before there was an iPhone. Most of this is obvious (in patent terms) and iterative but the bottomline is that I'm not buying another iPhone. Apple owns a large portion of marketshare, it's stock is sky-high and I'm going to vote the dollars of me personally to other vendors. Enough is enough.

Without going and looking stuff up, can you, personally, name one innovation Samsung has brought to the table in the phone industry in the last 5 years? I'm not just talking minor megapixel or processor upgrades, but something game changing. I'm sure they've done something, but I certainly can't think of anything other than a few gimmicky ideas that didn't stick and never went anywhere, so I'm curious what innovation it is that you think Apple is stifling in this case (quick note: I won't deny that they are doing so in cases against other companies, since they are, but I don't see that holding true with Samsung, which is about as shady a company as they can come (see censorship of journalists that they've engaged in, that their CEO was convicted and thrown in jail for maintaining a multi-million dollar slush fund but was let out less than a third of the way through his sentence so he could assist with South Korea's Olympic bid and resume his role as CEO, and the rampant nepotism taking place)).

And this is hardly the first time Samsung has been caught copying. Before they were copying Apple, they were copying Blackberry, Motorola, and others. For instance, go take a look at the Samsung Jack. It was formerly called the Blackjack and looked like one of the premier Blackberries of the day. RIM successfully sued Samsung and managed to force them to change the name of it. Prior to that, they had a phone that looked just like the Motorola RAZR after the RAZR proved to be popular.

Samsung has been the "me too" of the market for the better part of a decade or more. The only thing that's changed anytime recently is that the target of their copying is a more profitable source of ideas for them this time around.

"Samsung is Copying!" -- This, from a life form made of trillions of copies of a single cell, which was itself a derivative work: Combined partial copies of two other life forms. Using language, an idea copied between minds for millions of years, over a network protocol who's creator explicitly did not assert artificial patent restrictions over.

Life's very battle cry is: "Copy the best bits as much as possible!"... and Owning ideas is some how acceptable to you? Get a grip -- maybe on a steering wheel? Then imagine every vehicle having a different set of controls.

I don't see how you humans stand to share resources with such wastes of flesh.
It's no wonder no one will trust you with a warp drive.

Sorry, but I am fucking sick of all the Apple and M$ fanboi and shill articles and comments that seem to be all/. does lately.

Apple has built some decent hardware, and some total lemons. They always had higher margins than commodity PC makers. Moving to openstep (OSX) was a good move for them. Nothing that should make someone "loyal to Apple", nor anything that should make someone anti-Apple. They were just another fucking company like Dell, HP, IBM, Oracle, etc. They made shit and sold it.

Recently, though they have turned into a patent troll. Even if you like their products, you should realize that patenting a rectangle shape for a phone case and suing everyone in sight is fucking stupid. It is this behavior that has created Apple haters. I think justifiably. Apple is the new SCO. Hopefully they change, but if not, I hope it ends the same for them as SCO.

You're conflating invention with innovation, and you also missed that the question was specifically about the phone industry. Retina displays did not exist in phones before the iPhone 4. Multitouch displays did not exists in phones before the original iPhone. And their app ecosystem changed the way every smartphone since has worked, even though RIM and others had apps prior to that. Those are all innovations, even if they are not inventions.

Regarding most of the rest of what you said, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with much or any of it at all.

I think that's a good example. I don't think swipe to unlock is obvious.

1) No one else used swipe to unlock prior to Apple. Generally they used hitting some sort of button to unlock.2) There are other methods to unlock on a touch screen. For example MeeGo's double press to unlock.

Yes in retrospect it is obvious. But... there is pretty clear evidence in 2005, 2006 it wasn't obvious based on the fact that other people weren't thinking of it. If Samsung could prove everyone thought of it, they could have invalidated the patent.

_____

Now in terms of a theoretical world where those sorts of patents existed 20-30 years ago. We likely would have seen several GUIs that were radically different from each other. For example if the Apple Macintosh used a mouse, Windows might have had to use a trackball or a trackpad or a stylus type device. We would have a greater degree of GUI diversity very much like you have with Linux. Where on one end you have minimalist GUIs like Gnome, on another system feature rich configurable GUIs like KDE on another system different paradigms like tiling and keyboard controls like XMonad, on another systems swipe like MeeGo.

Samsung's success has come largely from making good phones. As in, large high quality screens and powerful hardware. On both counts they handily beat iPhones from the same generation, which is why I personally ditched iPhone 4 back in the day for S2, and never looked back.

Oh, and as a user of both products? Any person that thinks that S2 looks or works like iPhone 4, after using one for a few minutes, is retarded.

I wonder why Samsung wouldn't just leave US market, after all, it is only some 20% of worldwide smartphone market and shrinking. Just like Google left China with search engine nad let Chinese eat their own Baidu dogfood, US market is broken, so it is better left to Apple alone.

until all the facts are in, but I'm guessing that the $1bn number is the least of Samsungs and other smartphone manufacturers problems. Apple will now go after everyone else and I'm sure they wont be licensing anything to their competitors. Of course however an appeal is 100% guarenteed.

Apple already licensed a number of patents related to the iPhone and iPad to Microsoft, with a stipulation added that was along the lines of any device using those patents would need to look and feel different. The Surface was announced several months later, and there's certainly no mistaking it for an iPad. They also apparently offered to license various patents to Samsung, though it sounded like their rates were outright extortion to me.

Which is a significant problem with having juries in thorny, complex civil trials. Emotion, procedural rules and the voire dire triumph over expertise and reason. It can work in your favour or against you, but it is impossible to verify that the thinking processes of the jury are rigorous.
At least judges sitting on their own have to explain the process by which they reached their decisions. Here the reasoning process appears to be a badly filled in sudoku...

I see the trial was in San Jose. I am curious whether Koreans will be suspicious of the verdict. Maybe such trials should be on neutral ground. For what it's worth, halfway from San Jose to Korea from West to East appears to be, roughly, France.

The patent system is broken. The real question is should the patents that Apple claims Samsung infringed upon been granted. Imagine if this happened in the car industry. Only the first car company to put anti-lock brakes on their cars would ever be allowed to use the technology. Good ideas get copied. That is what is called progress. Only the specific implementation of that idea should be patented.

Actually the only real loss for Apple was the most talked about design patent. The D'889 iPad Design patent infringement alleged against Samsung's tablets was rejected by the Jury. This was the rectangle with rounded corners patent. So this is the one bright spot in this travesty.

The other design patents D'087 affected just a few phones, and D''677 effect most of the phones. But since they didn't effect all of the devices these patents probably won't have much of a long term impact (other than costing Samsung a lot).

The D'305 patents is a user interface patent on a grid of rounded square icons on a black background (can you believe they actually got a patent on that - sounds like most GUI interfaces the last 20 years). This impacted most of the phones but not all again so it shows this will probably not have a long term impact beyond the jury verdict itself.

The killer is the '381 "rubber band" patent and the '915 multi-touch/pinch-to-zoom patent. These are just patents on basic ideas. These are ideas, not inventions. All that is required to implement them is just the idea. A programmer could go and implement these features never having seen them before. These basic ideas are pretty much going to follow from using your fingers as the user interface so removing these features will make a pretty crappy user experience.

But the experts the idiotic news organizations interview say this big Apple win will lead to a lot of new innovation because competitors will have to jump through hoops to get around these patents. I know, we'll have a tongue interface. Double lick to zoom anyone!!

Toally agree. It's stupid to think that having competition is good. Clearly, the only smartphone that is allowed to exist is the iPhone. Everything else is a rip-off because it has icons and is rectangular.

The only good thing that has come of this is the media attention for how Apple is behaving. I was reading the comments on a 'normal' news website about another Apple patent related matter, and the dislike for them was very prevalent. Anti-Apple sentiments seemed to be about 90% of the comments. You can't be that much of a dick for that long without losing business. Look at Sony. Apple will always have the blind followers who have been using them for years, but most i think they'll lose in the end.

More surprisingly the jury found Samsung guilty of infringing Apple's U.S. Design Patent No. D618,677 and D593,087, which Apple's attorney's argued in testimony give it exclusive rights to produce rectangular smartphones with rounded edges.

You're right in that it's not the only thing it was about. It was also about...

the '301 ("bounce patent"; all devices), U.S. Patent No. 7,844,915 ("pinch to zoom"; almost all devices), U.S. Patent No. 7,469,381 (all devices), and '163 ("double tap to zoom"; some devices, but not others)

I don't know what lesson you suggest we should have learned, but I'm pretty sure the one people are going to be learning in the months to come is that your patent system is fubar.

When Apple really, really doesn't like you - they have no qualms just shutting you out. See also the replacement of Google Maps, the removal of YouTube app pre-install, the long delay in approving Google Voice (Siri 'competitor').

Apple spent 7.8 billion dollars [macobserver.com] on Samsung parts in 2011. Since both its Mac and iOS sales are only increasing that figure likely increased. So for Samsung even a billion dollar loss only amounts to about a 12.5% discount on all gear they sold Apple for a year.